Category Archives: Sociology

The percentage of realtors under age 30 went up 400% (*from 1% to 4%)

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Some younger adults are moving into certain careers they feel offer them opportunities in an uncertain world. This includes becoming a realtor.

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Some Zoomers like Marmo are ditching four-year degrees in favor of work that unchains them from a desk, puts money in their bank accounts sooner, and — they hope — will survive the artificial intelligence boom that is already starting to change once-hot professions like software engineering, consulting, and marketing. Some are turning to blue collar work like HVAC servicing and wind turbine installation. Others are trying to start their own ventures via influencing and side hustles. And some see the lure in the licensed white-collar job, including working in real estate or insurance.

That shift in licensed jobs is slow, but growing. The share of Realtors younger than 30 grew from 1% to 4% in 2024, according to NAR’s member profile, and sits at 3% in 2025. Among insurance agents, the median age of an insurance principal who owns 20% or more of their agency is 55, with 22% of principals over the age of 66, according to a 2024 study of agencies conducted by the Big “I,” an association for independent insurance agents. Many are likely eying retirement, which could open up a huge amount of demand for young people to take up the trade.

Several Gen Zers I spoke to for this story told me they find appeal in working in real estate because there’s no ceiling on what they can earn. Rather than invest tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in a four-year degree, they can spend a few weeks or months training to receive licenses and start working in fields where their hustle correlates to their payday…

Because it’s still something of a rarity to see a baby-faced real estate agent or teenager selling life insurance, the young people in licensure jobs I spoke to say that succeeding means not just learning the trade but competing against ageist stereotypes. The median age of a first-time home buyer has risen to an all-time-high of 38, according to NAR. That’s up from an average age of 33 a decade ago, according to a Zillow analysis. The idea of having a newly minted, 18-year-old real estate agent guide you through the biggest financial decision of your life is jarring. Katie Kenny, a 24-year-old Realtor in Chicago’s suburbs, says people meet her and are surprised, as they “expect the real estate agent to be like double my age,” she tells me. “They’re like, ‘oh, you’re young.’ And then when I open my mouth and start talking, they’re actually surprised because I do know a lot more, and I sound a lot more mature than what a normal 24-year-old would sound like.”

This article, like many articles, is trying to get a handle on a possible trend: younger people are pursuing different fields due to the world around them. There are numerous ways to report on this phenomena. This article uses a mix of statistics and interviews, considering broader patterns and hearing people describe their choices.

In the headline to the post, I highlight one way to report the data cited above. 400% growth in young realtors! 400% of anything sounds like a lot of change. A 100% increase or decrease would be noteworthy so 400% must mean a lot.

Another way to do this would be to take the approach above: the percentage of young realtors increased from 1% to 4%. This is not a big jump as both are small percentages. The odds of having a realtor under 30 years old is still 1 in 25.

Both of these options are factually correct. I would argue the second option is a better representation of the full context. Change happened but it is small change. If the same trend continues for 5 to 10 years, then there might be big change to report. Imagine the 30% of realtors under age 30 or 50%.

Someone will continue to track this data. It makes for interesting stories: “In an age of AI, college debt, and global crisis, more young adults in the United States are choosing to be realtors.” How big of a story it becomes partly depends on how it is told.

How would we know when there is a “housing panic”?

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Headline: “Housing panic grips half of US cities as record price cuts send home values tumbling.” What does the text of the story say?

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Sellers are slashing prices at record rates to to lure hesitant buyers put off by soaring mortgage rates and economic uncertainty.

In July alone, 27.4 percent of listings had a price cut — the highest rate ever recorded in Zillow’s monthly data going back to 2018.  

It helped push prices down year-over-year in 25 of the 50 largest US cities. Most were in the South and West…

Tampa prices are down 6.2 percent, Austin 6 percent, Miami 4.6 percent, Orlando 4.3 percent and Dallas 3.9 percent, according to Zillow…

Price cuts are more common in the South and the Mountain region, according to Zillow, as homeowners desperately try to offload properties.

Summary of this data: these are “record” cuts, supported by the number of listings with a price cut (27.4%), the number of metro areas with price cuts (half of the largest cities), and four specific cities have had prices drop between 3.9% and 6.2%.

This may be unusual behavior compared to prior years. It might not be what property owners want to see. Is it a “housing panic”?

Here are several indicators I could imagine of a larger panic regarding housing values:

  1. Prices dropping across all or most metro areas. (We read later in the article that values are up in some metros, mostly in the Northeast and Midwest.)
  2. Price drops of more than 10%. This may be an arbitrary cut-off but it is at least double-digits.
  3. Consistent public reporting and/or conversation about a housing panic. If there was truly a panic, wouldn’t it be easy to find that conversation?
  4. An inability to sell many homes even with larger price cuts.

This is worth paying attention to, both for the actual figures and how they are interpreted.

Measuring Walmart’s reach by its geographic proximity to 90% of Americans

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How much does Walmart matter in the United States? The company uses this statistic to get at this:

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Walmart operates more than 5,200 stores across the country, and 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart or Sam’s Club, the company estimates. 

In this story, this figure is cited regarding the rollout of electronic vehicle chargers. The implication is that many potential drivers could then access Walmart’s network.

Part of the Walmart percentage could be the sheer number of stores and it could also be about corporate decisions about where to locate. The company grew from its first store in Rogers, Arkansas to being in many communities across the United States. Do all retailers go for the same sort of locations as Walmart?

It would be interesting to compare to other kinds of business. Take fast food chains that have thousands of locations; would 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of a McDonald’s or a Domino’s? Or what about distances from dollar stores? (Or were once within 10 miles of a Blockbusters?)

Or we could consider other important places. How many Americans live within 10 miles of a park? A school? A police or fire department?

All that said, being close to roughly 300 million people in the United States is an achievement. This likely contributes to figures I’ve seen that suggest roughly 90% of Americans shop at a Walmart at least once a year. And a story from several months ago suggested 95% of Americans were within a 3 hour delivery of Walmart. Proximity has to help even if Walmart cannot be everywhere.

The suburban contexts of James Dobson and Focus on the Family

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In reading multiple obituaries upon the passing of Dr. James Dobson, I was interested to read about where he lived and where his ministry operated. In my book Sanctifying Suburbia, I examine how evangelicals embraced the suburbs, and I discussed in Chapter 6 two of the evangelical centers where Dobson spent much of his adult life: the suburbs east of Los Angeles and Colorado Springs, Colorado. But his suburban experiences also predated the professional career for which he became know. Here is what the New York Times reported:

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James Clayton Dobson Jr. was born in Shreveport, La., on April 21, 1936, the only child of James and Myrtle (Dillingham) Dobson.

He was the son, grandson and great-grandson of Church of the Nazarene ministers. The family avoided dancing and movies. His father, who never attended college, was a traveling evangelist, primarily in the Southwest, and young James lived mostly with his mother in Bethany, Okla., and graduated from San Benito High School, in San Benito, Texas, in 1954.

He received a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1958 from Pasadena College (now Point Loma Nazarene University) and a master’s degree in 1962 from the University of Southern California.

In 1960, he married his college sweetheart, Shirley Deere. She survives him, as do his son; a daughter, Danae Dobson; and two grandchildren.

After four years as a teacher and counselor at high schools in Hacienda Heights and Covina, Calif., he earned a doctorate in child development in 1967 from U.S.C. He was then on the faculty of the Keck School of Medicine for 14 years and simultaneously on the staff of Children’s Hospital.

Looking more closely at these early locations shows some connections to suburbs. Shreveport is a small big city with over 76,000 residents in 1930. Bethany is a suburb west of Oklahoma City created by Nazarene founders that grew from 485 residents in 1920 to 22,694 residents in 1970. San Benito is a small community within the Browsnville-Harlingen-Raymondville combined statistical area today that is not far from the Mexico border. It had between roughly between 13,000 and 16,000 residents in the 1950s while Brownsville at that point had between 35,000 and 48,000 residents.

Dobson went to college at Pasadena College. This college started as Pacific Bible College in Los Angeles. In 1909 it moved to purchased land in Pasadena, a suburb east of Los Angeles. When Dobson was in college, the suburb was finishing a growth spurt: it had grown from 9,117 residents in 1900 to 116,407 residents in 1960. In the early 1980s, a proposed move of Pasadena College to Santa Ana, another suburb southeast of Los Angeles in Orange County, failed and the college occupied a former college campus in San Diego (and became known as Point Loma).

His first jobs involved teaching in two suburbs east of Los Angeles. Hacienda Heights is an unincorporated community that had 35,969 residents in 1970. Covina is also in the San Gabriel Valley and its population exploded in the postwar era, expanding from 3,956 residents in 1950 to 30,395 in 1970.

Without closer study, it is hard to know exactly how these suburban experiences shaped Dobson’s views and work. But going to school and starting work in a hotbed of growing evangelicalism in the post war era – suburban Los Angeles – plus his own experiences in small communities outside bigger cities echo broader evangelical patterns. Emphasizing nuclear family life and conservative political values also aligns with reasons evangelicals could embrace suburban life.

An ongoing negative Trump narrative about cities

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President Trump and his political allies continue to discuss cities in particular ways:

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When President Donald Trump declared his third presidential candidacy in 2022, he saved his most colorful language for America’s urban areas, bemoaning “the blood-soaked streets of our once-great cities” and adding that “the cities are rotting, and they are indeed cesspools of blood.”

Later in his campaign, Trump called Milwaukee “horrible” and described Washington, D.C., as a “rat-infested, graffiti-infested shithole.” More recently he said, “These cities, it’s like living in hell.”

Other Republicans have seized on similar dystopian urban images. When Vice President JD Vance visited New York several years ago, he compared the city to a zombie apocalypse, posting: “I have heard it’s violent and disgusting there. But is it like Walking Dead Season 1 or Season 4?”

As Trump ramps up the military presence in Washington — and hints that he may move to take over other cities — his crackdown punctuates a frequent Republican message that American cities embody chaos, lawlessness and immorality, despite widespread recent drops in violent crime. With cities increasingly liberal and rural stretches ever more conservative, Republicans have a growing incentive to attack urban areas as the epitome of all that is wrong with America…

Trump’s rhetoric culminates a long history of American politicians casting cities as hotbeds of vice and social disorder, said Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University and author of “The Populist Persuasion: An American History.” Left-wing populists have often been dismayed by the vast wealth inequality on display in cities, he said, while right-wing populists have recoiled from the elites, immigrants and minorities who live there.

This resonates with some Americans because there is a broader and longer history of criticizing cities in the United States. From the beginning, a number of Americans have idealized small town or rural living. The growth of major cities was accompanied by numerous concerns. When asked today, many Americans say they would prefer to live in small towns.

At the same time, it is hard to imagine the United States today without its big cities and the good things that came with them. A United States without New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago? Or San Francisco, New Orleans, and Cleveland?

Even if voting patterns by geography seem fairly set in American national elections, it would be interesting to hear more politicians articulate messages that cross these boundaries. Are people living in cities, suburbs, and rural more different than they are similar? Breaking through the existing patterns might just require addressing issues that Americans face or care about regardless of where they live.

The wealthy and big suburbs in the United States

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Lists of the wealthiest communities in the United States often feature places with just a few thousand residents. But in looking at a list of the fastest-growing suburbs in the United States, I noticed that some of these fast-growing and large suburbs have high median household incomes. Here are 3 suburbs in the top 5 fastest-growing:

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SuburbPopulationMedian Household Income
Frisco, TX210,238$146,158
McKinney, TX202,314$120,273
Santa Clarita, CA229,021$119,926

For 2023 (the same year at the end of the data used for this list), the Census Bureau reported that the median household income in the United States was $80,610. The median income means that half of households are above this mark, half are below. These suburbs are way over this mark and they have a lot of residents.

I have wondered about this given my research over the years on Naperville, Illinois. It is a larger suburb – around 150,000 residents – and it is wealthy. In 2023, its median household income is $150,937.

Knowing what I know about Naperville, my guess is that the three communities above are home to thousands of white-collar professional jobs. They have lots of office space. They are home to national and/or regional headquarters for sizable corporations. They have a particular quality of life residents expect.

At the same time, people living in these large and wealthy suburbs might have different experiences from those living in small and wealthy communities in the United States. What does this wealth and access to resources look like on a daily basis? What kind of community engagement and spirit is there? What separates these bigger and smaller wealthy suburbs from the communities around them that are not the same?

Seven suburbs added over 40,000 residents between 2013 and 2023

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American suburbs are used to growth; as a whole, they have been growing for decades. But some suburbs grow much more quickly than others. A recent analysis suggests these seven suburbs added more than 40,000 residents in just ten years: Meridian, Idaho, Horizon West, Florida, Buckeye, Arizona, Santa Clarita, California, McKinney, Texas, Frisco, Texas, and Enterprise, Nevada.

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All of these locations are in the South or the West. All of them are sizable communities; the smallest has over 60,000 residents and several are over 200,000 residents.

Imagine how this much growth in a short period of time could change a community. More development and land in the community. Increased levels of local services, everything from school to libraries to firefighters to road maintenance. More traffic and activity. A different sense of who the community is.

At some point, the rapid growth of these ten years slows or stops. There is less land for development. There is limited appetite for building up or at higher densities. Growth moves to other nearby communities or other metropolitan areas.

It may take years for these suburbs to settle into being a place (1) that once had such fast growth and (2) that lives with the consequences of their now larger size.

The reasons Americans give for fighting against data centers in their communities

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As the number of data centers in the United States is growing, some residents are fighting back:

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Meanwhile, grassroots resistance to unchecked growth is on the rise. In Memphis, locals are trying to shut down an xAI facility powered by turbines they say are polluting the air in a historically black community that already suffers high rates of respiratory illness. A couple in Georgia told reporters their water taps went dry after Meta broke ground on a $750 million development in Newton County. In suburban northern Virginia, where the massive warehouses have become a fixture of everyday life, citizens complain that the developments are encroaching on neighbourhoods and homes at an alarming rate. In Prince William County, locals have even coalesced to try to change local ordinances and put an end to the incessant low-grade roar produced by data centre cooling systems.

In Alabama, residents in McCalla and in the City of Bessemer are united against Project Marvel. “We might be fighting an uphill battle,” David says, “but we’re going to fight it to the very end.” Locals have spent months pouring over academic reports and technical documents, trying to understand how data centres have been received in other communities and what risks might attend the development. They’ve also built a substantial coalition of allies in opposition to the project location, if not to the project itself, including Jefferson County Commission President Jimmie Stephens, State Representative Leigh Hulsey, and a wide range of environmental and other public advocacy organisations.

Generally, American communities think growth is good but they do reserve the right to try to have growth on their terms.

Reading this article and seeing online conversation opposed to data centers near me, I wonder which if these factors is more influential in the concerns people have:

  1. The environmental costs of data centers including high water and electricity usage plus possible pollution and noise.
  2. The sense that a community could find or approve better uses for the land rather than for a data center. How many jobs will actually be generated? Will the community actually see some benefits?
  3. A sense that tech and/or certain companies are dangerous or they could corrupt communities.
  4. Resistance to a potential change in local character that having a data center might represent.

Some of these are common responses in American communities to proposals for land use and others are more specific to data centers.

According to this article, there are already over 5,000 data centers in the United States. How many communities will say no to data centers and which ones will say yes?

Horror films, the suburbs, and “the seedy underbelly of American promise”

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Want to show that Americans may not be able to access the American Dream? Why not make a horror film set in the suburbs?

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Weapons is not a very scary horror film. It is, however, a fascinating movie about the suburbs and the way the architecture of family life supports silence and complicity. Horror movies often use the suburbs to interrogate the seedy underbelly of American promise. Whether exploring fear, ennui, racial tensions, or Satanic Panic, suburban horror films are about control—who has power and who desperately wants it.

Since the rise of postwar suburban sprawl, numerous cultural works have explored the facade of successful suburban life. What is hiding behind the green lawns?

Horror films do this in particular ways, following conventions in their field. One question we could ask is whether this particular film gets at this seedy underbelly in unique ways. Does it put together existing ideas in new ways? Does it break new ground in exploring the suburbs? Does it offer new commentary on suburban life here in 2025?

Another question we could ask: how many Americans are familiar with these horror film depictions of suburbs? If you have seen one or two such films, do you have a general sense of their suburban commentary?

Marijuana dispensaries and the ongoing reputation of suburban communities

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Over a decade ago, numerous Chicago suburbs debated regulations regarding marijuana dispensaries. One line of argument went that such establishments diminished the reputation of communities. Here is an update for one Chicago suburb:

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A second marijuana dispensary quietly has opened in Arlington Heights, years after controversy and debate about whether to allow the first one to do business in town.

Longtime Mayor Tom Hayes was outright opposed to the vice, arguing it would diminish the village’s reputation as a family-oriented community.

But supporters say times have changed, and there was the new mayor, Jim Tinaglia, holding giant scissors at a recent ribbon cutting welcoming the new business and its green — leaves and tax dollars — to town…

But others on the elected panel soon decided revenue estimates from local taxes on pot sales — as much as $500,000 per dispensary, per year — were too good to pass up.

This potential link between the status of the community and the presence of marijuana dispensaries sound like it could involve testable hypotheses.

First, we would need to get at the status of a community. The suburbs overall are considered by Americans as “family-friendly” but the suggestion here is that some suburbs are more about families than others. Could Census data reveal that a suburb is “family-oriented” or would this depend on survey or interview data of local leaders and residents? Or is this more about social class – income, wealth, housing values and types, etc. – and the status that comes with it?

Second, perhaps this is not about status but rather the need for local revenues. How do budgets look before and after considering a marijuana dispensary? Can suburbs afford to keep certain businesses out? Dispensaries may not be the only businesses suburbs do not want; this could range from tattoo shops to warehouses to other land uses considered not in character with the community.

At least from this one story above, it sounds like a change in leadership plus a need for revenue led to different local approaches. And does this come with increased local revenues and any difference in status?